1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic mail (e-mail) and more particularly to publishing e-mail subscriber information in an e-mail system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging represents the single most useful task accomplished over wide-scale computer communications networks. Some argue that in the absence of electronic messaging, the Internet would have amounted to little more than a science experiment. Today, electronic messaging seems to have replaced the ubiquitous telephone and fax machine for the most routine of interpersonal communications. As such, a variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems.
Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as a mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications, save for voice telephony.
E-mail has become a ubiquitous tool indispensable for the average person in both the work environment and home environment. As such, it is not unusual for individuals to enjoy multiple different e-mail addresses subscribed to correspondingly different e-mail accounts. Specifically, oftentimes users subscribe to each of a corporate e-mail account, a personal e-mail account, and in some cases a university account or an e-mail account for another social, educational, political or business organization. Thus, checking one's inbox for each e-mail account can become a tedious exercise for an e-mail user.
Users handle the problem of multiple e-mail accounts in a number of ways. For many, users choose to auto forward e-mail from one account into a master account that is checked frequently. For others, users configure a singular e-mail client to aggregate e-mail messages from all accounts. For most, however, users simply only check some accounts with frequency, while checking other accounts on an infrequent basis. Failing to check an e-mail account with great frequency, however, defeats the instantaneous nature of e-mail. Thus, the expectation of a sender of e-mail to a recipient that the recipient will review the e-mail expeditiously will be defeated if the e-mail is sent to an e-mail account of the recipient that is not checked with great frequency. Ironically, if the recipient checks the e-mail account with less frequency than a week, the sender would have been better suited to send the message in the e-mail by regular postal service.